Street Fighter

It would be easy to dismiss Street Fighter as just another video game action adaptation similar in scope and style to the recent Mortal Kombat film.  And it is, approaching its material with a similar wry irony in a constant state of ‘can you believe this?’  at war with a desperate desire to please the very fans who want to take it seriously, as much as Ryu (Koji) wars with his own inner darkness or Ken (Centineo)’s conflict with Ryu over shared envy of the other’s gifts or … any of many different conflicts stuffed into a two-hour running time.  Street Fighter, like its own conceit, is trapped in a tournament of its own making pitting plot against plot against plot against, an endless array of combat with no victory for anyone.

Beginning in 1987, the year of the first game’s release, in one of the gorgeously animated sequences reserved for the film’s various flashbacks, Ryu defeats champion Sagat to become the best fighter in the world, in the process unlocking the evil demon Akuma (Anoa’i) who pushes Ryu towards more violence and evil.  After their master is killed the pair split up, Ken becoming a reality TV darling while Ryu disappears until evil tyrant M. Bison (Dastmalchian) starts the tournament up again to draw Ryu out so that he can capture the fighter and the drain him of the dark energy he taps into to fuel his own personal power and ambitions.  Pulling in some of the most unique and dangerous fighters in the world to cover up his ultimate ambitions, the only thing that might stop him is CIA agent Chun Li (Liang) who has gone undercover to revenge herself on Bison for her father’s murder.  But none of them may have contended with the experiments Bison has been doing on a strange individual (Momoa) in his dungeons and …

You get the idea.  The various one sentence backstories of the game characters that were dashed off to create a vague sense of world-building have been transformed into a bible which can’t be deviated from as the filmmakers try to put everything Street Fighter they can into their Street Fighter movie, far more than it can ultimately hold.  With no defining authorial vision or editorial control, the film is pulled in multiple directions simultaneously, ending up with two protoganists who are mostly at odds with each other and two antagonists with their own plans and a tone which ping pongs between these poles and never settles on something final.  Director Sakuria, who came up working on Eric Andre’s comedy show, has solid comedic instincts and wants to instill Street Fighter with them which is fine, except that he wants to instill it with everything else, too.  No solid direction is ever selected, reducing the impact of every move it tries.

Some of it is knowingly living in the shadow of the Jean-Claude Van Damme version of the film which has become a cult classic in its own right.  It wants to take everything that people loved from that, sometimes verbatim, and also address every complaint about what that film did wrong, which produces more of a checklist of moments than a cogent film.  Is every character from the game you really like in it as their recognizable game selves?  Yes, most likely.  Is all of the original lore of the game represented as the game explained it?  Yes, most likely.  Is there an actual fighting tournament the major characters actually participate in?  Yes, most definitely.  Just listing it out, it probably does sound like exactly what you’d want a Street Fighter film to be. But a film experience is more than just a list of elements, particularly which so much is limited to just being a checkmark.

On the good side Centineo can hold up the comedy elements and the action elements, and a lot of work has gone into making the fights and fighters themselves fit into the imagined Street Fighter world as well as possible.  When the bell does actually ring it comes alive; Sakurai and his action team blend his own instincts and the fights needs into a satisfying whole that you can’t help but wish the rest of the film could contain.  In between, however, those moments become weightless and meaningless because all of the film’s emotional muscle is being used by Ken and Ryu and the resentments between them.  The various other characters of the sprawling ensemble show up intermittently for their fights or their monologues and that is all.  Some, like Cody Rhodes’ Guile, manage to overcome those limitations and make you long for more screentime from them, but most others disappear or worse, like Dastmalchian’s Bison, are hopelessly miscast for what they are attempting.

Street Fighter is mostly an enjoyable mess, and probably the best Street Fighter movie so far.  Moment to Moment it works far better than it has any right to.  It just unfortunately adds up to very little almost by design, ending on a cliff hanger with only a little real catharsis and most of the major conflicts unfulfilled.  Hopefully their bet pays off.

6 out of 10

Starring Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Callina Liang, Joe ‘Roman Reigns’ Anoa’i, David Dastmalchian, Cody Rhodes, Andrew Schulz, Eric Andrew, Vidyut Jammwal and Jason Momoa. Directed by Kitao Sakurai.

You Can See Everything

Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything is both a tense investigation of one of modern business’s most infamous fraudsters and a genuine investigation into the permeability between reality and fiction and how important that ambiguity is for us to function as human beings.

“You are most well-known for perpetrating the very thing you say cannot do,” Fielder says to Holmes, shortly before she is due to report to federal prison for fraud, about her insistence on not being able to lie and how at odds that is with her public persona.  It is as clear a thesis statement of Fielder’s film (which he co-directed with documentarian Lance Oppenheim) as is possible.  Fielder himself doesn’t take particular pains to fill in history about Holmes, assuming some level of knowledge of her and her actions – that she left college young to found the company Theranos to produce a machine which could perform complex blood tests on a small amount of blood and after years of presentations and bountiful press was found guilty of defrauding investors which ultimately led to her being sentenced to 11 years in federal prison, an odyssey which was ultimately covered in multiple books and an award winning TV series starring Amanda Seyfried.  Yes, this is all germaine.

During the extensive trial and appeals process, Elizabeth met and married Silicon Valley venture capitalist Billy Evans and started a family with him even with the reality of their inevitable separation hovering over them.  Three months before reporting for prison, Fielder began meeting with them and documenting their life, including their attempts to build a new version of Theranos and sell it to a new iteration of investors even as Elizabeth prepares to pay the price for her first attempt, an irony not at all lost on the filmmakers but apparently completely lost on Billy and Elizabeth.

If You Can See Everything was just what it seems on its face it would be naturally engrossing.  But rather than a straight forward investigative or interrogative piece, Fiedler frequently steps back into almost a thriller, his presence haunting the places it takes place like a shadowy ghost overseeing these young lives while keeping Elizabeth and Billy in extreme closup to the point where their faces stop looking like human beings and start seem like mostly humanlike animatronics which somehow seem just short of human.  The entire first half, up to the point where Elizabeth does actively go to prison in Texas, takes place in a rental house on the San Diego coast as Fielder observes their past with something like empathy and their approaching future with concern over their plans and interrogates Elizabeth and, increasingly, Billy for any sense of culpability over her / their deeds.

It shouldn’t surprise, but does, that they have known.  Not just collectively but throughout their entire family and support structure that view the charges and trial as an unfair scapegoating of a martyr filled with nothing but the purest of intentions who remains thoroughly confused on how they got into the situation they are in.  That in and of itself would be at least something of an expected reaction as people do build internal defenses against viewing themselves in a negative light, albeit one which is punctures some as Elizabeth’s parents nonverbally react to her work on her new company idea even as they vocally blame her former business partner Sunny Balwami, who she was also in a relationship with just as with Billy.  Which is where things begin to spiral, in the most interesting sense, as Fielder spends more and more time with and focuses as much on Billy and the way he enables and attempts to control Elizabeth.

Some of that is by necessity as Elizabeth must eventually report to prison and can no longer be an active participant of the film while Fielder still wants to look in to their attempts to repeat Theranos and, increasingly, Billy’s attempts to control Elizabeth’s image while she is cut off from the world, and the film itself.  It’s here that Fielder himself delves more and more, not just into reacreation, but genuinely disturbing combinations of fantasy and reality – all while stating a desire to show only reality – in a way that Holmes herself would identify.

Like most great documentaries, no matter what it’s creators seem to think, there are no easy answers.  Except maybe that Billy Evans has some sort of personality disorder.  Only messy, strange humanity that resists easy categorization.  That may be its greatest discovery of all.

8.5 out of 10

Starring Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans and Amanda Seyfried. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

VisionQuest

A showcase for the depths Paul Bettany and especially James Spader have been able to find in their comic book alter egos, Marvel’s VisionQuest falls prey to many of the issues which have plagued the studio’s Disney+ series as a light plot is spread over too more screentime than it can handle and which all the character development in the world can’t hide or fill.  Alternately too full and too thin, VisionQuest is pulled in too many directions at once and waits as long as possible to commit to any of them while trying to preserve surprise to a point beyond any help it can do the series, leaving the final plot turns and stakes void of the power they want to have.

Some of that is the reality of what the series wants to accomplish.  When last we left the android hero Vision (Bettany) he had been rebuilt after his destruction by the tyrant Thanos, but without any real memory of his prior life or emotional connection to his ‘wife’ Wanda Maximoff.  Wanda herself dealt with Vision’s apparent destruction by conjuring a pair of children with him who seemed to disappear when her spell ended but who have somehow reappeared as adults with the powers and memories of Wanda’s daydreams, unsure of their real lives or their connections to their remembered ‘parents.’  VisionQuest ambitiously wants to deal with both of these as Vision and Tommy (Mollica) are brought together by the machinations of a mysterious hunter (Stashwick) and the figure that has hired him.  Under attack from within and without, Vision has no choice but to turn to his own creator, the villainous Ultron (Spader) for answers.

It's a lot and simultaneously only the surface of the series as VisionQuest asks questions of our modern-day concerns around artificial intelligence and its place in our world and dives into Vision and Ultron’s joint lore while also explaining how each of the characters falling into the plot came to be and why.  And yet it often feels like very little.  Compared with some of the early stream Marvel series, VisionQuest is very obviously on a more constrained budget; Vision and Ultron appear in their animated forms only a few times leaving the series to be one more of classic television monologue and didacticism than big budget visuals.  Instead, it frequently retreats from the real world to a digital mansion where Vision the various AIs in his head observe the modern world while trying their best not to interact with it.  Or else it discourses on the backstories of its characters, which in and of itself is a good thing, but it’s also filling up a lot of screen time that plot can’t be allowed to, leaving every side character and their brother to hold things up while they explain where they came from in a way that verges on unnecessary.  No matter what executive producer Matalas (Star Trek: Picard) and Stashwick do, there is a logical limit on how much anyone can care about Paladin.

Matalas does however have a pair of secret weapons in the form of Bettany and Spader.  Their iterations of Vision and particularly Ultron were far and away the best part of Avengers: Age of Ultron and not only have they lost none of their affinity for the characters, their own elements of pathos and limited omniscience via genius make them excellent avatars for Matals own storytelling.  Their tete a tete’s are the most interesting elements of any episode as Vision both questions his own reality and probe’s Ultron’s own muddled and conflicting motivations.  What could be bland plot mechanics or philosophical posturing becomes a complex and nuanced character study between the two which carries the series over its rockiest patches.  It’s generally only when the series moves away from them to focus on Tommy or introduce a third android in the form of the mysterious Jocasta (Miller) that it slows down.

As a final conclusion to the mysteries of the Maximoff family or Vision’s own ongoing personality conflict, VisionQuest is serviceable enough but never quite lives up to the expectation of the series in a way several of Marvel’s recent series have struggled with.  As a showcase for Spader’s prickly megalomaniac and Vision’s own complex relationship with both his past and future in the form of Ultron, it is as good as anything Marvel Television has produced.  It’s unfortunate that you have to get through so much of the first in order to benefit from the latter or that it never quite lives up to its own ambitions, but more often than not it’s worth it for the attempt.

6.5 out of 10.

Starring Paul Bettany, James Spader, Ruaridh Mollica, Todd Stashwick, T'Nia Miller Emily Hampshire and James D'Arcy. Executive Produced by Terry Matalas.

Digger

Alejandro Iñárritu’s Digger is almost the platonic ideal of an Alejandro Iñárritu film, at least his modern incarnation. It is staggeringly well executed, with tremendous technical acumen and exquisitely staged scenes of buffoonery, all in service of a point so painfully obvious that his insistence on its importance ultimately ruins his own movie.  Filled to the brim with some truly delightful absurdity and well-staged madness, it’s less focused on technical virtuosity the way Birdman or The Revenant was, actively using its minutely observed production design and staging in service of its story rather than the other way around.  It’s just that the story it’s in service of is kind of lame.

It's all about Digger.  Digger Rockwell is a third-generation oil man, owner of the largest oil company in the world engaged in numerous exploration and production activities around the world.  He didn’t get to that position by being too worried about safety, he did it by digging!  So when one of his scientists warns him about increasing methane emissions from a flacer around Greenland he’s not particularly worried.  Not until it breaks off and starts heading for western Europe where it seems likely to wreak untold havoc on the local population.  Havoc that only Digger and his associates in the American government can stop, or if not stop then manage not to take the blame for.

Digger’s goal, if it wasn’t obvious, is to remind viewers how often wealthy elites, strip-mining natural resources for their own wealth and power, have left behind a diminished, less habitable Earth through negligence and nihilism. It is a point of view likely already shared by anyone watching the movie. Despite its innuendo and often clever staging, there is little room for its argument to surprise you, however bizarre the delivery becomes. The delivery in fact is frequently its strongest asset. Digger is as meticulously staged as a Wes Anderson film, populating its ridiculous world with increasingly bizarre characters trying to stop a radioactive iceberg from smashing into parts of Europe and Alaska. At the center is Tom Cruise as the elderly oil baron equipped with an over-the-top Texas accent, a shovel, prosthetics, and a robot cat. As with everything he does, Cruise throws himself wholeheartedly into the absurdity and, in the process, delivers one of the better performances of his career. The sheer force of his commitment could almost make you believe in the reality of this obviously ridiculous premise.  It makes one imagine an alternate reality in which he became primarily a stage actor—a career that, for the first time, I could see him being extremely successful at. None of the film’s larger problems are his fault.

Nor a generally exceptional cast who likewise put themselves entirely into Iñárritu’s hands, mostly to the good at an individual scene level.  Everyone around Cruise, particularly Riz Ahmed, joins in with equal aplomb; their scenes together often and somewhat ironaccly the emotional heart of Digger, standing on opposite ends of its argument (such as it is).  The requirement that John Goodman become progressively more cartoonish does little to help him as he gradually takes over more and more and the film’s final segments even when trapped in a refrigerator.

The problems lie in what Iñárritu wants all this buffoonery to accomplish. The great difficulty of satire is that while its target needs to be a buffoon, or at least appear to be one—that is, in many ways, the point—it also needs some measure of competence, or at least a belief in himself and what he is doing, to give it the edge it needs to land. When everyone, including the target himself, believes he is a buffoon, satire becomes farce. That would be fine if Digger thought it was a farce. But it doesn’t. It thinks it’s a satire.

The film is at its best when it holds to its genuine absurdity. Things tend to fall apart when it reaches beyond showing us the ridiculous world it has created to explain what that world means, because the filmmakers clearly think they are saying something more important than they actually are, or at least more fundamentally insightful.  There is meaning here but not much insight but no one in the film is aware of that. The great tragedy of this supposed tragedy is that its conception of satire is faulty, however accomplished its execution.

In many ways, it recalls Coppola’s Megalopolis, although it isn’t as good. Its willingness to take big visual and conceptual swings without much concern for whether everyone will go along with them can’t help but be admired. That most viewers won’t go along is not necessarily a mark against the film. That it has less on its mind than it thinks it does is.  Maybe it would be better if Iñárritu would imagine himself as the subject of one of his films and how his interests would be portrayed in a similar deconstruction and use that as inspiration to turn his storytelling gifts to better material.  Like Digger himself, that sort of change probably isn’t possible.

5.5 out of 10

Starring Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

The Uprising

The successful revolt of the put-upon working class over fatuous elites trying to control their lives is obviously attractive, especially in the current moment, but the need to anchor it with studio filmmaking requirements reduces its impact and removes whatever we could learn from its history.

At first glance it’s a wonder a recreation of the Peasants’ Revolt hasn’t been attempted at some point since the Reagan Revolution.  On its surface it plays directly into the anger of the commons which has been growing and growing over the last forty years.  Pieces of it will sound familiar: a laborious, aggravating tax was levied on the populace of England by the council of Richard II to refill the kingdom’s coffers after costly war in continental Europe leading to open revolt in the summer of 1381.  Turning on their arrogant lords, buttressed solely by the armed might of the state, they threw their overlords out and began marching on their local castles armed only with farming instruments and righteous anger.  They even had a charismatic and experienced commander – Wat Tyler – binding them together into a force for violent social change.  This, of course, is not who star Andrew Garfield is portraying.

Inserted instead into this violent unrest is the unnamed, schematic Ploughman who can simultaneously observe the historic actions as they unfold but, because he is a fiction, avoid any repercussions from them.  He is entirely a cipher of underclass rage, first encountered ploughing his fields and mourning over the graves of his dead wife and children (killed in a recent plague) and little understood more than that across the two hours plus of run time.  Director Paul Greengrass likes his suffering ineffable, playing across the faces his actors or exposed in cries and lamentations, and only rarely given voice in anything like spoken words or thoughts.  The Ploughman watches and grimaces and scrunches up his face and at points when very distraught rubs mud and muck into his face and hair.  There is no doubt what he is feeling, but at the same time he is responsible for nothing, except when his actions can’t matter.

Greengrass wants to use some level of verisimilitude to pull the viewer into the moment of the revolt.  Just as he portrays the revolutionaries as straight forward emotional elements, all feeling and little explication, the world is expounded at a visceral, visual level.  It’s a sodden smear of browns and greys mostly photographed in his trademark handheld camera as if he’d sent cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth through a time portal to stick a camera in his peasants faces (which they dutifully ignore like good cinema verité participants should).  By the same account he pulls in the real people involved, at least in physical form.  None of them seem to be actual human beings or deal with the world as a person beyond the broadest strokes.  Tyler gathers the growing mob and leads them to London where Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Robert Hales react with cartoonish plotting and bovine astonishment at the failure of the schemes and they speak only the most rudimentary wants and desires because that is all they seem be able to think.  Everyone is the bare minimum of what is needed to propel the historical narrative to its next signpost.

With the Tower in the people’s hands, Sudbury and Hales and the rest of the King’s council are executed leaving the king himself to wash his hands of his venal council’s deeds and promise charters of clemency and pardon to everyone who took part, theoretically quelling the riot and bringing peace back to the land.  Instead, when the people gather for their charters, they are met with the mailed fist of the King’s army as “The Uprising” reduces a year of trials and recriminations to a summary stroke of repression as the adolescent King becomes the tyrant he had been accused of being. 

Had “The Uprising” had been left at that, for all its want of depth, there would be something to take from it about the shape of revolt and the circularity of class conflict.  But that would leave a sour taste behind as well and we can’t have that so somewhere victory must be pulled from the mouth of defeat.  Re-enter the Ploughman. After spending a protracted stretch standing on the sidelines watching characters fulfill their historical roles, he is catapulted back into the center at the point of disaster to invent a Robin Hood-esque figure who can claim moral victory in the face of utter failure.  It’s a promotion that costs “The Uprising” nearly everything the first two hours earned, dodging consequence in a search for a happier ending.

The clash of class rage into the reality of change and how much it fails as succeeds is an interesting topic worthy of examination, particularly in the wake of a real historical event which touched all the relevant ideas.  Modifying it for the sake of catharsis which never arrived doesn’t do anyone any favors.

Mutiny

It’s not The Beekeeper – the new milestone for modern, absurd, tough-man action-fantasy and very specifically the Jason Statham variant of that type – but as a piece of reliable action entertainment is reminds why Statham is so good at (or at least useful for) this type of thing.  The follow up from Plane director Jean-François Richet’s action discursion about an accidental action discovery of slavery and Indonesian piracy around a plane, is Boat (which is not what Mutiny’s title is but it really should have been) also about the accidental action discovery of slavery and piracy and the fight against it.  Like his previous film, Richet and company easily recognize how much little the film needs beyond, focusing entirely on blood, knives, bullets and Statham methodically dismantling anyone unfortunate enough to get in his way.  It would be easy to describe it as run-of-the-mill, which is entirely accurate but not at all descriptive. It’s more likely cinematic comfort food; not very good for you but frequently exactly what you want.  In the face of it, it is easy to pine for the batshit insanity of Statham’s wilder endeavors (can’t a man shoot at least one helicopter down with a handgun?) but Mutiny is competent enough which is an enjoyment of its own.

The incredibly action hero-ily named Cole Reed (Statham) – a former soldier and police officer whose name is always said in full by everyone – has been working for years as bodyguard to shipping billionaire Tibu Campallo (Tikaram).  After Tibu sells his company shadowy forces promptly have him murdered (calling Cole Reed’s bodyguard capabilities very much into question) leaving Cole Reed thirsty for vengeance.  Backtracking the route of the assassins to a freighter, Cole Reed sneaks on board to ride it to its destination and hopefully find out who sanctioned his boss’s murder.  Cole Reed is in for more than Cole Reed bargained for when he discovers the freighter is shipping slaves as part of a global human trafficking ring, the likely reason Tibu (no one ever says his full name) was murdered.  Joining up the ship’s temporary third mate (Wallis), Cole Reed has no choice but to save everyone on board AND get his revenge in the process.

It’s both a lot and a little bit of story for a tidy 95-minute run time, spread which manages to alternate between going too fast and too slow and never quite finds that goldilocks zone.  It takes roughly a third of that for the stakes to be set and premise to come into its own as Cole Reed sneaks onto the freighter that will be our home for the rest of the film.  In theory that time has set up his relationships with Tibu and family and why he is doing what he’s doing, but theory only ever takes us so far.  In practice Cole Reed is still enough of an empty slate that even after he discovers the victims and starts dispatching bad guys there is still a need for a Navy captain following the ship who can constantly look up Cole Reed’s past and opine on it in order to fill in any character blanks we still have.  That’s not unusual for these types of films but Mutiny is not exactly overstuffed enough to need it – the spare, single location is filled with roughly 15 victims and half again as many enemies which is not a lot to fill another hour.  These are modern times for action movies, budgets are tight and production values must come down, but that does leave the remaining hour to be stretched around a relatively small collection of villains and there’s just so much Cole Reed to go around.

If there is any sort of action performer who can make this sort of stripped-down non-spectacle function, it is Statham.  His specific sort of hard-bitten charisma often works best when he’s on his own, silently gritting his teeth and setting his shoulders against whatever adversity has been set in his way.  They still must manufacture someone for him to talk to so that the film is more than an hour long, dropping Wallis on board for no other reason as seen by the length of time she spends captured and waiting for him.  That’s not a weakness, either, nothing really is.  Mutiny is terribly competent and not at all memorable – there’s just not enough bizarreness or wit for that – but Richet keeps things moving even as Statham and camera remain frequently trapped in extremely dark cargo holds.  It all reinforces the idea of a professionally assembled action programmer making some level of use out of what it has.

There’s nothing to take away from it.  Not aesthetically, not thematically, not artistically, and there won’t be anything to linger with you once the credits have finished rolling.  None of that means it’s bad or even particularly a waste of time.  Statham’s particular combination of physical credibility, taciturn charm and commitment to hurting bad people is remarkably durable.  There have been better versions of these, and recently, which fully embrace the lunatic energy and big personalities of the genre, but no one else at the moment can make something so fundamentally ordinary remain watchable.  Mutiny is exactly the movie you think it is from its first moment, and that’s perfectly fine.

But they should have called it Boat.

6.5 out of 10.

Starring Jason Statham, Annabelle Wallis, Roland Møller, Adrian Lester and Ramon Tikaram. Directed by Jean-François Richet

Coyote vs. Acme

Coyote vs. Acme is a far better movie than it has any right to be, even if it’s not all that it could be.  Occasionally character focused, a little angry and sharper focused than one might expect and most of all funny, it can’t quite live up to the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? standard, but maybe it doesn’t need to.  Taken on its own merits there’s enough self-awareness to give it more heft than this kind of film often manages:  a corporate oriented piece of IP-exploitation about the nihilism of IP-exploitation and the banal villainy behind it.  Self-aware lampshade hanging doesn’t by itself induce quality – see the mixed success of Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers for proof of that – but Coyote at least attempts to add something like real insight on top of the meta narrative. 

But how meta it is.  As we all know, for years Wile E. Coyote has been trying to capture and eat the speedy Road Runner.  When genetic cunning and capability has failed him he has turned to the tools of the ACME corporation to help him – rocket boots and catapults and bombs and the like – but it never quite works out.  Eventually fed up with the whole thing, Coyote enlists the aid of cartoon lawyer Kevin Avery (Forte) to sue the ACME corporation for all the pain and suffering they caused him through their defective gizmos.  The more the underdog legal team digs into the case the more sinister ACME’s motives become, revealing an uncompromising sense of corporate greed willing to do whatever it wants to juice profits.

The villain of Coyote vs. Acme you see is capitalism itself.  In the form of ACME we are given capitalism at its ugliest a system not simply lacking in heart but possessing a malicious belief that anything outside the corporation itself exists only to be monetized, consumed or discarded.  As an idea it’s both more pointed and more cartoonish than most of the nostalgia it actively deals in, not least because it’s embodied by the films most cartoonish characters, both literal (Foghorn Leghorn) and figurative (John Cena).  There’s little subtle about the exaggeration, nothing involving the Looney Tunes is given to subtlety but there is also some real missed opportunity to compare it to Kevin’s own predatory ways as he seeks out desperate clients and easy settlements over anything like justice.  Not that a film called Coyote vs. Acme needs that sort of thing – it can and does subsist on a healthy diet of restaged cartoon sight gags and inside jokes – except in they way that it points at them.  When the Road Runner makes his long delayed appearance to recontextualize the nature of his relationship with Coyote the film actually starts to realize some emotional depth it had avoided at all cost until that point.  It says something about Coyote’s construction that despite giving him little inner life, it is easier to believe his frustration, humiliation and attachment to the Road Runner and their ritual than it is to the emotions of most of the human supporting characters.

It gets left to Forte to do most of the dramatic heavy lifting when he’s not acting as the butt of Coyote’s oddly timed traps and constructions.  Forgetting why on earth many of these gags would exist at all (beyond the knowing requirement that the movie needs them) it doesn’t hide the strangeness of casting a performer famous for making buffoonish unreality sincere and forcing him into the role of straight man.  Cena by comparison has a much easier time of it as he is allowed to become a live action cartoon, smiling malignancy in a suit, and it fits perfectly within the satire of the film.  In some ways it would be curious to know how it would have played if Forte and Cena had swapped places, which may sound like a critique of the film Coyote is not rather than the one it is, except it only occurs because of the deviancy of the film itself.

Director Dave Green, working on a screenplay which seems to have gone through a dozen hands, is trying mightily, which results in a film that is more interesting than it is successful.  It still must exist in a world where there are both wonderful examples of a film clearly explaining how cartoons can be true to themselves while still experiencing the human range of desire, resentment and hope, and examples of abject failure at the concept.  Coyote vs. Acme careens between those poles, never quite going over the edge but not quite able to stay on the straight and narrow either.  But it is funny and often unexpectedly sincere, if disjoined but maybe that’s the way it should be.  A film about Wile E. Coyote repeadetly discovering the elaborate contraption he has built doesn’t work quite how he intended being itself a flawed device that frequently gets close but never quite lands may the only result that could have been possible.

6.5 out of 10

Starring Will Forte, John Cena, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Luis Gutierrez. Directed by Dave Green.

The Odyssey

There are two types of films that it is easy to write about: the very good and the very bad.  Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is both easy and difficult to write about. Easy, because the film has a clear and deliberate argument about Homer’s epic and its meaning in the modern world, and difficult because of that argument.  Rather than simply recreate the well-known episodes of Odysseus’ journey, Nolan choses to engage with them at their core, challenging the story’s assumptions, and asking what it means to a contemporary audience.  It is a complete recontextualization of one of Western literature’s foundational works and one that can only be described as modern.

In the classical telling of The Odyssey, Odysseus is the exemplar of a heroic character.  A warrior tested by forces beyond his control, placed before him by gods, enemies, and fate starting with the great walls of Troy themselves.  After breaking them down with is legendary strategy Odysseus is bedeviled at every step on his voyage home by monsters, witches and the seas themselves.  Each, from a giant Cyclops to a cliff dwelling monster and the call of the Sirens, he is able to best but still is waylaid twenty years trying to return home only to find his ancestral land overrun with greedy suitors attempting to steal his wife (Hathaway) and kill his son (Holland).  By confronting each, like Hercules at his labors, he reaffirms himself a hero.

Or at least, he used to.  Nolan’s interpretation turns that idea inside out. Rather than seeing Odysseus’s trials as proof of his heroism, the film presents them as the consequences of his actions. His journey is not simply a punishment imposed by the gods, but a confrontation with his own role in the violence and destruction that shaped his life.  Nolan’s Odyssey suggests that the heroic stories civilizations tell about themselves often preserve the victories while erasing the cost. Odysseus has spent years carrying a legend of his own greatness, one which old comrades like King Menelaus (Bernthal) still speak about at feasts years after, but the journey home forces him to confront what that legend leaves out.  The man who entered Troy through deception and violence must eventually reckon with a world where mercy and human connection matter more than conquest.

There is also the hint that Nolan himself, for all his work in the superhero space, has issues with handling mythology (not lore but the underpinnings of the fantastic).  His filmmaking language has often been built around physical systems and frequently find drama in mechanisms, the interaction of structures and carefully designed environments. Witness the exact neatness of the world folding on itself in Inception or moving backwards in Tenet.  Odysseus’s world, by contrast, is far more elemental; one not of machines but oceans, islands, deserts and vast empty horizons.  Although defiantly contrasting Odysseus and his loneliness against it, it also suggests his unease with the truly mythical and preference to show literal nothingness over the fantastic.  The supernatural elements of The Odyssey are often treated less as concrete realities and more as experiences filtered through memory, storytelling, and perception. Nolan keeps the magical, like the cyclops Polyphemus or the spells of the witch Circe, distant, obscured, or partially hidden.

Perhaps because of this, the film feels most assured when it returns to Ithaca and focuses on human conflicts. The struggles between Telemachus, Penelope, and the increasingly aggressive suitors are not about monsters or gods, but power, memory, absence, and the consequences of choices.  Ultimately, The Odyssey is not Nolan attempting to preserve Homer’s epic in its original form. It is Nolan asking what the story means now and that is why it may endure. A straightforward attempt at a “definitive” adaptation might preserve the original story but risk becoming tied to its own moment. This new version instead creates a conversation with Homer, one that future audiences can continue to revisit and reinterpret themselves.

8.5 out of 10

Starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Samantha Morton, John Leguizamo and Jon Bernthal. Directed by Christopher Nolan.

Moana

The old saying is ‘you can’t go home again.’  Not just because it has changed from remembrance, if not been lost to time entirely, but because we’re not the same individuals who left it.  It exists purely as the thing we remember, a fact reality is always a poor comparison to and which we are often inevitably let down by.  That doesn’t stop us from continually wanting to, however, or continually trying.  Moana certainly wants to, both the film and its central character played by newcomer Catherine Laga’aia.

Just like the original from ten years ago, Moana dreams of a time before her tribe settled on its ocean home, when they sailed from island to island as wave born hunter-gatherers.  She sees their transition to a settled agricultural society as literal death in the form of pestilence and plague and, despite her father’s (Tui) best wishes, rush out to sea to find the demigod Maui (Johnson) and calm the ancient sea demon which attacks her people whenever they set out on the water.  And, perhaps in the process, she will find her own sense of identity as her people’s future leader and embrace it rather than run from it.

It was a straightforward and engaging story when it was first told and it essentially still is.  In many ways less adaptation than recreation, it often repeats scenes and compositions almost exactly as they were in the original.  More than that, it understands the strengths of the first film and lives by the motto of not fixing unbroken things.  Lin-Manuel Miranda’s songs provide the same emotional energy and memorability they had before and the story still works as a construction for Laga’aia’s sincerity and confidence.  She carries the film with the same sense of curiosity and determination that defined her animated counterpart.  Dwayne Johnson’s return as Maui is more of a mixed blessing. His personality remains naturally suited to the character, but Maui also demonstrates what is lost when animated characters are translated into a more realistic world. Animation allowed the character to be exaggerated into a true mythological figure. His size, movement, and expressions could reflect his status as a demigod. In live action, even with visual effects, he is limited by the physicality of a real performer. As larger than life as Johnson is, what worked so well in animation seems diminished when placed within the constraints of reality.

Moreso, by copying the original so exactly it takes on its strengths as much as its weaknesses.  On the surface, Moana appears to be about rejecting outdated traditions and embracing the future. Moana sees her island struggling because her people have become trapped by fear and isolation. She leaves to discover a better path, but her solution is not actually a new one. She learns her ancestors were once great voyagers who traveled across the ocean and dreams of going back to that time, intimating progress coming not from invention, but from remembering what was forgotten.  While stories often look back to a lost golden age, a time when humanity possessed wisdom it has since lost, human advancement has generally come through adaptation and innovation rather than restoration.  The past can provide lessons, but the future is rarely created by simply returning to what once was.

That tension creates the greatest missed opportunity of the live-action Moana. A remake could have challenged its own assumptions by exploring whether returning to ancestral ways is truly progress, whether the past can ever be recovered, or whether each generation must create something beyond what came before.  Instead, the film itself becomes an example of the very thing its story questions. It does not explore new territory; it retraces a familiar journey. The audience receives nearly the same story, the same emotional beats, and many of the same images, but without the sense of discovery that made the original special.  It’s a problem that has bedeviled most of the Disney live action remakes.  They gain much from the originals because they preserve the elements that worked while adding in detail and precision, but in the process they lose the charm that made the animated films unique.  The added realism and visual detail cannot replace the expressive freedom, stylization, and emotional immediacy of animation.

The end result, though not a travesty by any means, is often less than the sum of its parts.  It never takes that final step. It finds the same island, follows the same voyage, and reaches the same conclusion. It is a technically impressive recreation of a journey audiences have already taken, but it never discovers a new horizon of its own.

6.5 out of 10

Starring Catherine Laga’aia, Dwayne Johnson, John Tui, Frankie Adams, Rena Owen, Gerald Ramsey and Awhimai Fraser. Directed by Thomas Kail.

The Invite

There is, we keep hearing, a dearth of adult-oriented films coming from Hollywood.  A focus on kid’s films, animation and four quadrant blockbusters has sucked up all of the resources and creativity of the studio system, leaving little behind to compete with the kinds of films we used to make.  Such was said in the 80s as New Hollywood ground to a halt, and in the 90s and 2000s as well, and no doubt will be in the future when looking back at the 2020s.  But it’s also impossible to avoid the feeling that adult-oriented comedies like The Invite are thinner on the ground than they used to be, enough to feel refreshing even as it reminds of better films, and lenient even when it veers to shallowness.  Drawing inspriration from everything from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to Judd Apatow movies, Olivia Wilde’s adaptation of Cesc Gay’s play blends its influences into something both familiar and contemporary.  It never quite shakes those influences, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The invite in question is to Hawk and Piña (Norton and Cruz), the new couple in a toney San Francisco apartment building who have caught the eye of homemaker Angela (Wilde) and the ire of her husband Joe (Rogen). Angela, feeling shut in and unfulfilled as a stay-at-home mom, has picked the new neighbors as a way of bringing herself out of her funk by inviting them to the sort of upscale adult dinner party she wishes she threw, but doesn’t.  She’s also picked them, whether she realizes it or not, because Joe can’t stand anything new or which breaks into his carefully built bubble of comfort at home and they do both, particularly with the sounds of the energetic and frequent lovemaking coming through the walls.  Inviting them behind Joe’s back, Angela must combat his stubborn refusal to take part and the gradual unraveling of her preparations (including a lack of food and drink) amid escalating tension.  Neither of which leaves them at all ready when the happy couple actually knocks on the door.

Like a good stage play (and it is obvious The Invite was one if you weren’t aware at the outset), Wilde’s film understands the value of anticipation. Nearly half its running time is spent preparing for Hawk, a retired firefighter, and Piña, a clinical sex therapist. Their entrance is built through conversation and expectation before they finally appear, at which point the film subtly changes gears, marital sniping giving way to passive aggression, curiosity, and eventually genuine self-examination. Wilde's gift for comic timing, memorably displayed in Booksmart, is back at the fore, keeping what could have become a claustrophobic, stage-bound exercise lively and cinematic. Conversations swirl from room to room, alliances shift, and the dynamics between the four characters continually evolve. The story steadily moves toward what ultimately feels like its only logical conclusion, but it reaches that destination through a series of detours, reversals, and surprising emotional.

At the core of it is Joe himself, displaying Rogen’s increasing strength with drama.  His grumpiness and internal disappointment with life have manifested as chronic back pain and emerges regularly through sarcastic remarks and emotional withdrawal rather than honest engagement.  A momentarily successful pop musician, his life instead has veered into the steady middle class where he works as a music schoolteacher and drowns himself in regrets on things that didn’t work out.  It leaves all his conversations with Angela to dissolve into the kind of petty bickering and accumulated resentment that anyone who has spent time around a couple on the verge of divorce will immediately recognize for no other reason than she is the best available target.  He’s not just the source of most amusement but the wounded soul most of drama and pathos The Invite can generate derives from.

The shift comes when the neighbors reveal the true purpose of their visit: to invite their new friends to the occasional group sex they have been taking part in for some time, the new way they approach intimacy with friends and neighbors wherever they live.  What could become broad farce, and almost does, instead opens the door to unexpectedly thoughtful conversations about honesty, desire, insecurity, and the compromises people make within long-term relationships.  It’s not without flaws. There are moments where the dialogue feels clunky, and even an actor as naturally charismatic as Seth Rogen struggles to make such a deeply unpleasant character consistently compelling. At times, his bitterness threatens to overwhelm the audience's sympathy.

Even so, The Invite’s wit, emotional intelligence, and willingness to continually surprise more than compensate. Beneath its provocative premise lies a compassionate observation about relationships, that the end of a marriage is not necessarily the end of love, nor even an ending in an absolute sense. Sometimes relationships simply transform into something new, and every ending contains the possibility of another beginning. That idea gives The Invite a warmth that lingers long after the credits roll and, just as importantly, reminds us why films like this matter. The Invite is exactly the sort of thoughtful, funny, conversation-driven movie people claim they want more of. If we truly do, then supporting films like this is the only way to ensure they continue to be made.

Rating 7.5 out of 10

Starring Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz. Directed by Olivia Wilde.

Supergirl

An unfortunate mix of some of the worst instincts of modern big budget filmmaking and some truly inspired casting offering promise for the future, Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl is an occasionally compelling entry in the latest version of DC films.  Anchored by an excellent performance from Milly Alcock, it presents a vision of Kadddra Zor-El defined by grief, cynicism and dislocation which may not necessarily be everyone’s ideal for a fun summer superhero film.  Built in intentional contrast to Superman – isolated instead of surrounded by humanity, longing for her past rather than her future, cynical instead of hopeful – it’s dour film which asks much of Alcock to retain interest, perhaps more than is possible or even fair.  And still, even at its end, in search of its own identity.

Rather than surviving the destruction of Krypton itself, Kara Zor-El was born in a floating city after the planets end.  When the means of her people’s salvation turns against them in the form of deadly radiation poisoning Kara is sent to Earth to live with her cousin Kal-El, better known as Superman.  Unable to handle the pain of loss and unwilling to follow her cousin’s course into superheroics, Kara bounces around outer space where she can dampen her powers to drink herself and her loneliness into a stupor.  In the middle of one such bender to bounces into angst-ridden orphan Ruthye (Ridley) on a quest to revenge herself against the Brigand (Schoenaerts) who murdered her family.  When Krem poisons her beloved dog Krypto, Kara finds herself dragged into the quest, trying to save her dog from death and Ruthye from a fate worse than death.

It’s the kind of set up which could deliver an interesting take on the classic superhero staple but requires a lot of goodwill on its audiences’ part, goodwill for which not enough has yet been done.  Some of that comes from casting Kara as a reluctant hero full of bad habits, a literal dichotomy to Superman leaving her more defined by what she isn’t than what she is.  It takes a lot of screen charisma to make that work and though Alcock puts her all into Kara, the film she’s in isn’t always up to the challenge.  Gillespie attempts to cover for this by relying heavily on familiar superhero storytelling devices, from slow motion rock song needle drops to a Lone Wolf and Cub dynamic designed for emotional manipulation.  The Kara / Ruthye is intended to provide emotional contrast and reflection, allowing the film to externalize Kara’s internal struggle through her relationship with a young girl on a revenge-driven path. In practice it never really comes alive, feeling more like a structural obligation than a relationship that organically deepens either character, leaving Supergirl’s thematic intent clearer than its emotional impact.

It’s just as muddled visually as it’s story.  Much of the setting is confined to indistinct alien worlds and environments rendered in familiar shades of muted brown and metallic gray. Rather than embracing the strangeness the way executive producer and DCU mastermind James Gunn did in his Guardians of the Galaxy films, Gillespie settles into a relatively generic visual language that flattens its sense of place. This lack of distinctiveness becomes more noticeable as Supergirl goes along, contributing to a feeling of tonal uniformity rather than discovery.  The characters are in frequently the same space, the antagonists functioning primarily as placeholders for cruelty, defined by familiar villainous acts without meaningful individuality or motivation.  Schoenaerts Krem is constructed as an overly sadistic figure threatening through intensity alone but the performance and writing never coalesce into something memorable.

Gillespie and writer Ana Nogueira seem aware enough of that to immediately start looking for band aids, notably in the form of Momoa’s fan favorite character Lobo being brought to the screen for the first primarily because he is a fan favorite.  Like Ryan Reynolds’ approach to Deadpool, there is a sense of total alignment between actor and role, as though the character has finally found the right vessel. In isolation, Lobo is one of the film’s more engaging elements. Within the narrative itself he feels like an interruption rather than an integration. The story does not need him and he is left to function like a preview of future projects rather than a necessary part of the present one.

What ultimately emerges is a film that is consistently watchable but rarely distinctive. It is buoyed by a strong central performance and occasional flashes of thematic interest, but undermined by structural inconsistency, an underdeveloped villain, and a persistent sense that its most compelling ideas remain underexplored. Supergirl is not a failure, but it is also not yet a fully realized vision. It exists in an in-between state: competent, occasionally engaging, and ultimately searching for a stronger film to support the character at its center.

6.5 out of 10

Starring Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jason Momoa, David Krumholts, Emily Beecham and David Corenswet. Directed by Craig Gillespie.

The Furious

Visceral, fast-moving and filled to the edges with balletic choreography, Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious is almost everything you could want from a kung fu movie, even if it’s not quite all that you would want from a film.  Like most films in the genre, a lot of the focus and ingenuity is focused on that level without enough interest to dig deeper, which is not necessarily a problem just a reality of the genre.  The Furious has been touted as the greatest new action epic since The Raid. It is not entirely up to that level of comparison; there is considerably less going on under the hood once you get past the high-wire theatrics and stunt work, but it is the kind of action film we periodically need to remind us why we love the genre in the first place. 

When Wang Wei (Miao), a mute Chinese national with a mysterious past and formidable kung fu skills, sees his daughter kidnapped by a group of street thugs, he launches a one-man rampage through a shadowy Southeast Asian underworld to find her and bring her home. Plowing his way through an increasingly stylized assortment of memorable goons, many of whom could easily have been Street Fighter opponents, he uncovers a deeper well of corruption built around exploiting the children of the area, stealing them from their parents and selling them into sexual slavery.  Along the way he runs into former police offer Navin (Taslim) looking for the same answers he is.  Together they join forces to destroy the children smuggling ring and find some measure of revenge, even as the violence destroys everyone around them.

As he picks up nearly as many allies as enemies, Wang Wei continues charging headlong into one brutal confrontation after another, each one providing a new reason for Tanigaki and his team to unleash truly incredible fight choreography. A little bit of Death Wish, a fair amount of Assault on Precinct 13, and a whole lot of Bruce Lee and Donnie Yen, The Furious stakes out solid ground for itself as a modern martial arts showcase. In that sense, it is among the purest of modern kung fu films: deeply sentimental, almost entirely without irony, and willing to embrace both the best and worst habits of the genre.  At the same time it’s impossible not to wish some of the creativity on display in the action couldn’t have been extended to the story itself.   Though serious and frequently tragic The Furious is one-note enough that it becomes difficult to feel much for the characters’ successes or defeats. They are caricatures more than humans; machines built to put on a kung fu show, which they do extremely well, but not extensive drama.  Tanigaki seems to know this, throwing in a new fight scene every five seconds or so just to keep us distracted. The Furious is a mile wide, but only an inch deep.

Tanigaki’s background as an action director and choreographer is visible from the very beginning, as The Furious opens with hard-hitting, acrobatic kung fu sequences that are thrilling, hilarious, and unbelievable all at once. And yet somehow it continues upping the ante, moving through an underground fighting pit, a strange ice house where the villain’s enemies are frozen to death, and eventually into the bowels of a secret prison.  Tanigaki is keenly aware of both the limits of his actors and stunt performers and the possibilities of his surroundings, and he uses everything to maximum effect and then some. There is nothing too far, no limit he will not push past, giving The Furious a sense of the absurd that wouldn’t be out of place in Jackie Chan’s work and yet doesn’t feel derivative or out of place.

And maybe that’s enough to keep its deficiencies at bay.  By the time we get to the final battle, with five different combatants all fighting one another for different reasons and from different backgrounds, all that remains is the rhythm of the moment.  The thinness of the story has largely fallen away.   Does it yank you out of the movie sometimes when there is a particularly bad line reading, or when people survive being hit full force in the head with a sledgehammer, thrown out of four-story windows, or hit by cars, only to get back up and keep running?   It can, but at the same time, that is what The Furious is here for: a headlong rush of adrenaline that carries you from beginning to end.

7 out of 10

Starring Xie Mao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Brian Le and Yayan Ruhian. Directed by Kenji Tanigaki.

A. Rimbaud

Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory remains, ten years on, my preference for the best film of the 2010s and one of the best of the 2000s so far.  Intricate, layered, full of constant surprise and humanity it was a filmed play (and that is not at all a pejorative the way it can be) taking the best of classic stage drama as the core of his filmmaking.  A. Rimbaud, Wang’s first film in almost decade, does very much the same thing while being in almost all ways a completely different experience.  A one-man play, shorn of mis en scene, ensemble or anything else to distract from its character or narrative, it nonetheless holds the attention across the entirety of a man’s life.   Thrilling, engaging, difficult, and requiring much of its viewer, A. Rimbaud unique and challenging choices are a prime example of what makes Wang’s filmmaking so interesting and intricate to begin with.

Picking up with Rimbaud as a young man embarking on his first foray’s into poetry, A. Rimbaud follows his youthful daliances and thoughts before discarding them in favor of a working life as a merchant in Cyprus.  Ignoring the siren call of Rimbaud’s artistic endeavors – the elements making him a target for a biopic at all – Wang instead chooses to focus on the man, what he thought about the world around him at different points in his life and through that why he choose to leave art behind and become a middle class striver, something his peers could never understand about him.  It’s not clear Wang does either, we’re all still external to Rimbaud’s internal life even within the film itself, but it’s the most direct examination of it ever.  Just as Rimbaud does, Wang quickly and directly leaves his poetry behind to keep his eyes in direct focus on the poet.

By giving up nearly all of the external trappings of film, Wang is able to focus more definitively and concretely on Rimbaud’s life: what he thought about his circumstances, how he reacted to them, and, more importantly, how those circumstances changed him over time, revealing the complexities of a human life.   We don’t really see his youth or earliest days. The film begins with his internal initiation as a young man into a self of his own, and then follows that self as it grows and changes in response to the world around him, and very specifically how his tempestuous relationships with his closest friends and family change and reveal him until he is occupying a mind and a history as far from poetry as one might imagine it possible to be.  One can imagine the young Rimbaud at the beginning of the film looking ahead to where he eventually ends up with nothing but derision and distaste, in a way that suggests his artistic impulses almost had nothing to do with him, even though they were purely a product of his life at that time.

In the process, Wang delves more deeply into Rimbaud the poet than most biopics of this type, showing us the real person behind the creation, in all of his facets, and, in doing so, giving us a new understanding of how someone created what they did and, in many ways, how completely removed a work of art can be from its creator.  Notably it is always through conversation, albeit conversations we can only ever hear one side of, making the film almost epistolary in nature.  Letters from the past delivered over time, they become like a documentary of solo evolution in time lapse.  It goes without saying that none of this would work without the strength of Blake Draper’s performance. He has to hold the screen, and our attention, for the entire three hours by himself, with almost nothing else to hold on to, not even a set to hide behind. With growing confidence and verve, he gradually takes over more and more of the screen until you forget that he is the sole presence here. It is a dynamic tightrope act between writer-director Wang and actor Draper, one that either of them could lose their balance and fall from at any point, but neither does.

Perhaps the first real attempt, in text or film, to try and answer the questions about why Rimbaud made the life choices he did, and what that has to say about the art he created, A. Rimbaud requires a very real amount of effort and work from its audience, but it’s work that will be rewarded.  Patrick Wang’s previous film was easily one of the best of the decade in which it came out. It is entirely possible that we may be able to say the same for A. Rimbaud may say the same for the 2020s.

8.5 out of 10

Starring Blake Draper. Directed by Patrick Wang.

Disclosure Day

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is one of his most frustrating offerings, visually inventive but also reductive and regressive. Working with many of his favorite collaborators from 50 years of filmmaking—including writer David Koepp, composer John Williams, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski—has produced a film very much like many of the ones he has made over that time span. Stylistically immaculate, crafted at the highest level, and filled with recognizable flourishes, Disclosure Day offers little in the way of new visual or thematic discovery. Its imagery recalls War of the Worlds and Minority Report, and frequently, deliberately, reaches further back toward the awe-struck vocabulary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, revealing similar thematic thinking that was fresh and interesting in the 1970s but has not evolved in any real way since then. The result is a film that looks effortlessly accomplished, but also strangely recycled.

At its core is Dr. Daniel Kellner (O’Connor), a mathematician on the run from a shadow organization led by a shadowy man (Firth), with a backpack filled with video proof of the existence of extraterrestrials on Earth stretching back decades—knowledge that could upend Earth’s beliefs about itself the way Copernican observation did to the Church. And like Copernicus, Kellner is persecuted for it, hounded through middle America as he tries to bring his proof to a former insider (Domingo) intent on releasing the information to the world. His secret weapon, whether he realizes it or not, is Missouri weatherwoman Margaret Fairchild (Blunt), after she spontaneously develops the ability to understand everyone and everything, reading minds and seeing over great distances to view the world as it really is, including its alien visitors.

It’s a recipe for exquisite strangeness and some genuinely taut tension, especially when Scanlon uses the alien technology at his disposal to take over the mind of Kellner’s ex-nun girlfriend (Hewson) to ferret out his location. It’s also a premise that might have felt urgent in the X-Files-shaped atmosphere of the 1990s, but in the 2020s it lands awkwardly, out of step with a political culture whose conspiratorial imagination has shifted into darker, more paranoid, and more political territory. Some of this may be intentional, or at least in keeping with the spirit of Disclosure Day’s themes; it clearly wants to ask large questions, not only about where we came from and where we are going, but about our relationship to belief itself. More specifically, it is interested in modern Christian belief and how faith changes when confronted with radical new information from outside the known world. Copernicus rears his head again.

The trouble is that David Koepp’s script approaches these ideas in the most surface-level and prosaic way possible. Casting Jane as a former novitiate offers the kind of lazy backdoor to stage direct, explicit conversations about belief that a better movie would be cagier about, as if the audience may not understand otherwise. That loss is especially frustrating because the movie repeatedly gestures toward richer conflicts. The apparent beginnings of World War III with North Korea, for instance, form a counter textual crisis to the hidden one involving the aliens. The two should converge, with one revealing or transforming the other. Instead, the geopolitical crisis is kept so firmly in the background to keep focus on Kellner and Fairchild and their bloodless chase that it may as well not exist at all.

The same is true of the film’s most intriguing human conflict, which is not its heroes at all—they are, in fact, a little bland—but its shadowy puppet masters, Firth and Domingo. Disclosure Day offers repeated hints and provocations about their long, complicated history, a history that seems to speak directly to the film’s larger ideas, but which is pushed away in order to focus on keeping the plot moving.

Blunt is fantastic as Fairchild, a television weatherwoman blessed with one of the film’s great character names. She is the perfect communicator: a woman intuitively linked to the strange events unfolding around her. It’s a role that could easily be turned into a plot device, but, like Samantha Morton’s work in Minority Report, Blunt transforms her clear plot contrivances into emotional trauma and wonderment. She becomes the beating heart of the film. O’Connor is a more prosaic Spielberg hero, there largely to carry the physical demands of the adventure sequences. He is effective in that role, but he and Blunt, by design, spend much of the film running from forces they barely understand, toward a destination they can hardly define.

Still, Spielberg’s command of action remains formidable, particularly in a beautifully constructed train set piece in which O’Connor and Blunt’s car is nearly forced into the path of an oncoming train, requiring them to escape onto the train itself before being crushed. For all the passing years, Spielberg has lost none of his visual splendor, nor his ability to build tension and deliver a clean, propulsive set piece.

That mastery only makes the film’s limitations more glaring. Almost everything in Disclosure Day feels old-fashioned and out of date, right down to the clownish antics of the supposedly deadly soldiers tasked with capturing the heroes and preventing them from releasing their information to the world. Spielberg’s craft remains impeccable, but the film’s ideas feel timid, familiar, and oddly insulated from the moment it is trying to address. For all its ominous proclamations, and truly intriguing build early on, there’s just not much to see here.

5.5 out of 10

Starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell and Henry Lloyd-Hughes. Directed by Steven Spielberg

Mortal Kombat II

After a more successful than not second bite at the apple of making a Mortal Kombat film, something that had already been done somewhat successfully once, Simon McQuoid and the Atomic Monster team are back to take a second bite at the apple of making a Mortal Kombat sequel, something that previously only been a miserable failure and quite possibly one of the worst films ever made.  So low bar.  And mostly successfully cleared!  Taking lessons learned from his first attempt at a “grounded, R-rated Mortal Kombat film” McQuoid and company have ditched most what didn’t work the first time around, along with some of what did, and ended up making something not too different from Paul W.S. Anderson’s first attempt at the franchise thirty-some odd years ago.

Despite victory during the previous Mortal Kombat tournament, Earthrealm is under assault once again, this time directly from the evil emperor of Outworld, Shao Kahn (Ford) himself. Needing to bulk up Earthrealm’s forces for the coming confrontation, Lord Raiden (Asano) has pulled in a new audience surrogate to have the depths of the game’s lore explained to, this time in the form of has-been action star (and original game native) Johnny Cage (Urban).  Joining the survivors of the previous film, Cage and company must mount a defense against a seemingly unstoppable foe and destroy the source of Shao Khan’s powers if they are to have any hope of saving their world.

Cheeky, cheesy and much more focused on over-the-top (to the point of silliness) violence than a ‘grounded take’ on the venerable gaming franchise, Mortal Kombat II is still a large improvement over the first film.  That can almost entirely be marked down to the sidelining of original character Cole (Tan) – who worked neither in conception nor execution – and replacing him with literal movie star charisma.  A more straightforward admittance by a filmmaker that their previous decision was a mistake (particularly from a film successful enough to gin up a sequel) is hard to find.  And it mostly works!  Urban immediately takes over every scene he is in, embodying a mixture of dynamic competence and Hollywood lethargy that is hard to combine, as both action star and comedic foil.  If anything he risks upsetting what is still an ensemble, as any scene without him noticeably flags.  Only Josh Lawson’s Kano (one of several dead characters making a miraculous return) can really keep up with him.

McQuoid has also shifted dramatically tone wise focusing more on silliness and a light tone, albeit trying as hard as possible (and probably too hard) to maintain an R-rating, with more of a Deadpool vibe than the previous film’s seriousness.  All it lacks is a character speaking directly to camera.  This is most fully summed up in the return of another piece of the game’s original setting which the first film somehow incredibly avoided – the actual tournament itself.  Characters are shifted, often without warning, to familiar recreations of classic arenas for one-on-one battles which are frequently the high points of the film even when some of the effects become dodgy.

 A side effect of this, and the larger cast, is a heavy emphasis on exposition, particularly in the first act as Johnny is brought up to speed on what he is being brought in to.  Even Urban has difficulty doing anything with this, no matter how much he swears through it, and it continues to bog down much of the film which wants some level of emotional catharsis but has little time to build to it having ejected so much of the previous film.  It also creates strange tonal clashes particularly when it reaches most forcefully back to the arrival of the first film with the return of Hiroyuki Sanada’s Scorpion, trapped in a true hell where he must continue fighting his mortal adversary because the audience requires him to.

 All of that could easily work against Mortal Kombat II, but instead it bounces along aided by a strangely affable tone and a willingness to dive into its own silliness in a way everyone was afraid to the first time.  It still has its problems, it might not even be the best version of a Mortal Kombat film, but it is a real improvement over the previous film. Maybe they’ll get a third try this time.

5.5 out of 10

Starring Karl Urban, Adeline Rudolph, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Ludi Lin,Mehcad Books, Tati Gabrielle, Lewis Tan, Tadanobu Asano and Hiroyuki Sanada. Directed by Simon McQuoid.

Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord

Star Wars animation has come a long way.  In its earliest days, well in its earliest days it was a standard Saturday morning license arrangement producing innocuous cartoon commercials in the Transformers/GI Joe era.  And it could have easily remained that way.  Instead, after the conclusion of the Prequel Trilogy, George Lucas decided to turn to animation as means of continuing his story with a focus on quality and storytelling.  The result was … strange, a near anthology of the effects of the Clone Wars (and by extrapolation, war in general) on cast of dozens, bouncing across time and space to tell everything from war stories to thrillers to lore heavy mystic dives and esoteric comedy to economic focused dialectics on banking and war profiteering.  It was a little bit of everything.

What has come since then, and Lucas’ sale and retirement from the company, has been both more and less than that – skirting Clone Wars broad reach for more standardized storytelling while pushing the animation itself further and further from the original shows’ intentionally low detail look.  Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord is in many ways the peak of that decision making process, a leap over the franchises’ most recent animated efforts closing the visual gap in many ways to the live action series it lives alongside while also moving closer to that storytelling style with a less distinct personality as animation.

That means, despite the title, Maul -  Shadow Lord is only partially about the double-bladed lightsaber wielding former Sith Lord. Like many villains their power lies in their mystique tending to lead stories about them to focus on supporting characters rather than focus on the title characters’ inner life.  It’s hard to create an inner life for a monster; far easier the ones who are affected by him.  Much of Maul initially seems to make that same calculation, keeping him in the shadows to build up its bystanders: the police captain (Oscar nominee Moura) trying to hunt him down without alerting the Empire and the hidden Jedi (Adlon and Haysbert) just trying to survive even as Maul starts a gang war with his rival crimelords.

And if it had just stayed like that, Maul would have been one of the franchises more entertaining offerings with villainous villains and staunch heroes and thrilling chases and escapes.  Creator/producer Dave Filonie (Ahsoka) and his team refuse to rest on their laurels; instead of spending all of their time with their new characters responding to Maul the cross conflicts are used to ratchet up tension across the different stories until they have no choice but to intersect one another.  As Lawson’s investigations uncover the two Jedi,  the Empire sends its own Inquisitors to hunt them and Maul down, forcing the groups into alliances of convenience and questioning their own motivations and how true to them they are willing to be.  Moura and his rowdy cohort quickly become match for any band of heroes Star Wars has offered.

Nor is Maul immune to those effects, finally forced into some real introspection about his desire for revenge on his old master while still being blind to how similar they are in outlook and methods.  Witwer,  who has voiced the character for over decade now, gets a chance to do some of his best work as Maul and rises to the challenge.

Which doesn’t make Shadow Lord a character study by any stretch of the imagination.  Once the character intersections are set, particular by the time the Empire and its Inquisitors arrive, it is an exercise in pure adrenaline. With the  increased focus and budgets on the live action series’ it’s easy to wonder why push for animation but it becomes clear once the action beats heat up – none of the live action series could achieve the quality and complexity of action filmmaking Filoni and crew put on.

A fantastic piece of adventure filmmaking that just feels like Star Wars from beginning to end, Shadow Lord is one of the best pieces of animation Lucasfilm has put out since the original Clone Wars.

7.5 out of 10

Starring Sam Witwer, Gideon Adlon, Wagner Moura, Richard Ayoade, Dennis. Haysbert, Chris Diamantopoulos, Charlie Bushnell, Vanessa Marshall and A.J. LoCascio.

Daredevil: Born Again - Season 2

Fixing many of the issues of the first season of Daredevil: Born Again, primarily resulting from the writer replacement and re-configuration the first season went through partway into filming, Born Again season 2 benefits greatly from a more concrete vision and focused storytelling from beginning to end, even as its reach often exceeds its grasp.  Whatever the original, or even second plan had been, Daredevil has been retrofitted into a commentary on modern times, and the authoritarian measures the federal government has been increasingly using on top of the never-ending superhero battle between the Kingpin of Crime (D’Onofrio) and the masked vigilante Daredevil (Cox).  It is an ill-fit at best, hampered by its straightforward style and focus on story exposition over subtlety … Andor this is not. Which doesn’t mean it is not frequently a very good Daredevil series.

After gradually, begrudgingly, retaking the Daredevil mantle following the murder of his best friend, Matt Murdock (Cox) finds himself on the run from his old foe Mayor Fisk (D’Onofrio) who has declared marshal law in New York and all vigilantes outlawed, even as he searches for evidence of Fisk’s true plan.  It appears in the form of a freighter of illegal weapons Fisk is shipping for a shadowy CIA operator (Lillard), a chink in the armor which Murdock and Karen Page (Woll) race to exploit even as they dodge arrest.

After the gradual, unfocused discussions of the first season the singular idea of Born Again Season 2 is Murdock’s fight against a proxy-ICE in the form of Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force providing the kind of catharsis the real world often cannot which is the original draw of the superhero story in the first place.  It’s a welcome change of pace, helped by centering on Murdock and Page’s on-again / off-again relationship within the resistance and pushing therapist Heather Glenn (Levieva) to the side as she grapples with surviving a serial killer’s assault.  In the midst of it all there is an unmistakable feeling of returning to old ideas as Murdock still finds himself fighting the Kingpin as well as his eternally returning foe Bullseye (Bethel).  At a certain point it is clear to both the characters, the actors and the writers that Matt needs to move on – and by the end there is a welcome feeling of clearing of deck chairs – but uncertainty about exactly what that will look like.

What that results in is a series which sounds better in summation than it is in experience.  As good as it can be in its quieter moments, particularly as Matt grapples with his Catholic beliefs around forgiveness in the face of what his enemies have done, the attempts to move to larger political points fall flat primarily in the execution.  No one can think of any way to say things except in the most plain manner possible which can work but doesn’t and leaves showrunner Dario Scardapane backed into a corner for a climax which must address these core themes in some way other than a physical confrontation.

Daredevil: Born Again Season 2 is a thoroughly more well thought out show than its predecessor willing to take big swings not seen since the series’ earliest days.  The follow-through is frustratingly not always up to the task but with a sense of the series moving on from its oldest tropes and starting a new status quo for season 3 – including the welcome return of several Defenders colleagues – the future looks bright ahead.

7 out of 10.

Starring Charlie Cox, Vincent D’Onofrio, Deborah Ann Woll, Wilson Bethel, Margarita Levieva, Genneya Walton, Michael Gandolfini, Arty Froushan, Matthew Lillard, Clark Johnson, Ayelet Zurer, Krysten Ritter, Tony Dalton, Camila Rodriguez and Lili Taylor.

Project Hail Mary

The kind of high-minded science fiction Hollywood rarely produces these days, the adaptation of the newest Andy Weir novel is very much like the adaptation of The Martian with enough now familiar ‘Weir-isms’ that the form is starting to be defined.  This includes extended, video assisted epistles to push the exposition along without dragging it down among scattered humor and can-do optimism crashing into supposedly impossible problems.  Within that filmmaking duo Lord and Miller (The Lego Movie) have pulled out a supremely human film buoyed by the friendship between a man and a rock, and a reminder what big-budget studio filmmaking can accomplish.  Project Hail Mary is a breath of fresh air even as it starts to wear out its welcome.

Which is not to say it feels completely original the way Weir’s first attempt at heady, humanistic sci-fi did.  Beginning as blog entries, the original version of The Martian made logical use of the medium it was first created for to resurrect the epistolary form with a series of recordings by its doomed astronaut documenting his attempt to save himself (rather than letters of doomed 17th century melodrama the form is more known for). Having broken through and with all the options for storytelling available without the need to sell himself again, Weir’s followed was told in … a series of recordings by its doomed astronaut, Ryland Grace, (Gosling) documenting his attempt to save Earth.

Except for the points where his recordings also include his alien best friend, Rocky (Ortiz).

Which is clearly the biggest, and best, change from The Martian – and not because it has an actual Martian, or Erid --  that Grace has someone to talk to and bounce off of even as he grapples with both the how great the problem is he is trying to solve and the reality he will probably not survive the attempt.

The Sun is dying, its fuel being slowly eaten away by a strange alien microbe which can survive the extreme temperatures and seems unstoppable.  Faced with the possibility of extinction, the human race marshals all of its resources in finding a solution under the firm control of Eva Stratt (Hüller) who makes clear there is nothing she won’t do to succeed.  When Grace, dis-Graced astrobiologist with some strange idea about life in the galaxy who has been reduced to teaching high school, discovers the possibility of a cure in the far reaches of space a bold plan is developed to send a crew of astronauts on a potentially one-way journey to the star Tau Ceti.  Including Grace, whether he likes it or not.

Though its individual scenes are frequently stolen by Rocky and, when she’s around Hüller, it sits on Gosling’s shoulders who carries Project Hail Mary with grace and charm.  It takes a strong presence to carry extended amounts of screen time alone, potentially without dialogue (unless, like 2001, the film is specifically trying to underplay presence or humanity), a situation Grace finds himself in when he awakens around Tau Ceti from a medically induced coma to discover none of his other crewmates survived the trip and he has lingering retrograde amnesia from the coma.  Facing the terror of being alone in a spaceship in the middle of nowhere and no idea what to do, Grace responds with … math.  What could easily be overdone either in its dread or its silliness instead balances steadily between the two without overwhelming.  It speaks volumes to Lord and Miller’s facility with comedy and Gosling’s willingness to just go for it against a literal backdrop of nothing. It’s the kind of difficult acting work which can easily go unnoticed but requires depth at the level of representing trauma as well.

It doesn’t last, but that’s a good thing. Shortly after arriving in orbit around Tau Ceti, Grace is joined by an alien spacecraft sent from 40 Eridani which is suffering the same problem as Earth and which also has only one survivor … a three limbed rock creature Grace nicknames ‘Rocky.’  After overcoming the differences in communication the unlikely pair find themselves jointly battling against loneliness and isolation as much as the lifeform destroying their solar systems, transforming Hail Mary from heady sci-fi drama to buddy movie until it realizes it has to snap back to its plot.

In between Grace gradually recovers more memories about how he got into his present circumstances … a device which is very useful before Rocky arrives and much less so after.  Hail Mary falls into this trap more than once, unsure what to trim and what to keep and tacking on more and more material from the book to an increasingly lengthy run time.

For the most part, the film can weather it with the strength of Gosling’s movie star chops and some genuinely inspired imagery from Lord and Miller adding grandeur to an ultimately human story of connection and friendship.

Hollywood should probably make some more movies like this. Weir should write something different next time out, though.

8 out of 10.

Starring Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung, Milana Vayntrub and Priya Kansara. Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller.

Send Help

Don’t give up on your dreams and don’t let them fester and die in the exchange for some financial security.  Climg to them and chase them against all odds and common sense until they drive you to madness and murder in their pursuit.  That’s the American Dream in Sam Raimi’s world, or at least within the world of Send Help.  A nightmarish take on the Swept Away genre of castaway romance blended with comedy, cynicism and copious bodily fluids, Send Help is the old school Evil Dead director returned to a dazzlingly bleak and entertaining world built around the question of who is the least vile.

Your first thought would not be mousy financial manager Linda Liddle (McAdams), a quiet cubicle worker diligently working towards her long desired promotion before going home to her pet parrot.  Of course, your first thought would not be she is also a multiple-time candidate to appear on “Survivor” with a wealth of knowledge under her fingertips about taming an uncivilized wilderness if she ever found herself stranded on one.  People have depths.  Some people; not so much her new boss Bradley Preston (O’Brien) who has inherited wealth without working for it and has no idea how to survive in the wild (and was preparing to fire Linda).  When the company plane does indeed crash in the Pacific Ocean the unlikely pair finds themselves stuck together with the possibility of something new growing between them.

And that something new is hatred and mania.

Send Help plays fast and loose with the tropes of this particular romantic fable, starting from the horrific deaths of the passengers on the plane and the increasingly gory encounters Linda survives trying to keep the pair alive initially.  More importantly it immediately defines Bradley through cartoonish villainy and misogony relative to Linda’s seemingly straightforward goodness and dependability. As the days stretch into weeks, the isolation gradually reveals their truer selves, whitling away their outside pretenses – that Bradley’s shitheel exterior hides a shitheel interior while Linda’s kindness can quickly and easily transform into a hardness unwilling to take no for answer.

In different hands it could be a psychological character study, dispensing with romanticism in favor of pure nihilism as it embraces the darkest sides of human nature.  None of that would be remotely as entertaining as what Raimi has put together as he turns to comedy as much as gore in a delicate balancing act most could not pull off.  That is, if the word delicate could be used to describe a film where McAdams must vomit continually all over O’Brien’s face.  But it’s also true, particularly during its messier third act twist when it appears rescuers may have found the island to end the pairs ordeal possibly before Linda is ready for it to.

The only thing worse than not having a dream, it turns out, is having one and watching it taken away.  Within this setup, Raimi and his two very game stars who must carry almost every scene alone, play that thought out not so much to its logical conclusion as much as its most unhinged just to wink and say this is what we really want.  This, in Raimiville, is the reality of the American Dream, one fueled more by monomaniacal desire than belief and which, if threatened, becomes an engine for destruction.

Just the way it should.

7.5 out of 10

Starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel and Chris Prang. Directed by Sam Raimi.

Greenland 2: Migration

When your previous film concludes with the end of the world, where do you go from there?  Underground to watch the remnants of humanity slowly wither and die in Cormac McCarthy style dive into the pitilessness of nature?  Or as Ric Waugh’s follow up chooses, out into the world to admit (or pretend) it didn’t actually end, it was only mostly dead and decisions for the future must be made after all.

Picking up five years after the first film, John Garrity (Butler) and his family have been surviving in an underground bunker in Greenland, believing they are one of the only remaining pockets of humanity left on Earth. But they may not be surviving for much longer. Radiation from the comet strike stubbornly refuses to recede, making it impossible to plant food, while increasing earthquakes threaten to make their refuge uninhabitable. When a scientist friend proposes the mind-bogglingly unlikely theory that the comet's crater in southern France may be teeming with new life—the only place where human civilization can rebuild—the Garrity clan decide they have nothing to lose and embark on the dangerous journey south.

Greenland 2: Migration is the apotheosis of the '70s disaster film brought into the 21st century. That is high praise. The end result is highly episodic and frequently chaotic, with characters and dramatic beats coming and going sometimes without rhyme or reason. Yet it never loses focus on the cost to the family or the desperation Butler faces in keeping everyone alive and safe. No matter how ridiculous some of the plot instances are (you'd think at some point they would learn to stop having picnics in fields—it never goes well for them), it never feels false or wastes time trying to become the action movie it is not.

It would have been extraordinarily easy for the filmmakers to descend into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of violence, cynicism, and brutality and call that depth. While there is certainly petty conflict—not all of which makes sense or works in any logical world-building way—more often it moves into surprising meditation on the detritus of the past and the need to move on from it. Whether they are watching a group of elites hoarding resources in their own bunkers or driving past the ruins of treasure ships on the floor of the now drained English Channel, the ruins of the past are everywhere reaching out grasping fingers to hold them back.  Yes, there are dangerous people who will ambush and rob, but there are also regular people who will help a family in need rather than exploit them. It is in its frequently warm humanity that Migration separates itself from and frequently exceeds the first film, eschewing normal action-oriented thrills for something more like an episodic character drama set against the worst setting imaginable.

This isn't to say the film takes full advantage of its setup. Rather, it bounces from conflict to conflict, never giving any one of them enough time to build into something truly dangerous. Many of these story beats could have been easily expanded into a full film on their own. But frequent Butler collaborator Waugh makes the bolder choice to keep the family heading south into France no matter what, bringing each new episode to a rushed and often surprising end.

This structure gives Butler—and to a lesser extent Morena Baccarin—the opportunity and responsibility of holding the narrative together not with guns or mayhem but through the pathos of their characters recognizing the sheer odds they face. Butler's John Garrity, more than anyone else, carries the weight of the film as he eerily begins coughing up blood early on, suggesting there are no happy endings for him in the near future. Butler plays off that self-knowledge excellently, adding real weight and depth to all the twists and turns the family's voyage takes with the foreknowledge that he has limited time to succeed.

It all creates a film that is somewhat weightier than would be expected, especially for a sequel to the first Greenland. This isn't to say it has a lot on its mind beyond "you really have to do it together"—this is a surface-oriented version of depth. But it's trying in a genre and scenario where it doesn't have to and could potentially hurt itself by doing so. And mostly, it succeeds.

Butler may never get the accolades of a great actor or movie star even when he's had some excellent roles, but Migration is a film held together almost entirely by one actor and their performance—by design as much as by necessity—and that is no easy thing to do.

Greenland 2: Migration is a worthy and frequently superior successor to the first Greenland, throwing out most of the disaster film playbook to make something more episodic and introspective than anyone would have guessed, and ultimately more rewarding as well.

7 out of 10

Starring Gerard Butler, Morena Bacarin, Roman Griffin Davis, Peter Polycarpou, Amber Rose Revah, William Abadie, Sidsel Siem Koch. Directed by Ric Roman Waugh.